It's really interesting, but what it shows perhaps more than anything is the value of publicity. Tracking 3 of my ibles that were each featured (F) and appeared in the newsletter (N), its obvious how much this recognition is worth in terms of views (see image). However, can it help me make better instructables? Probably not. My best instructable (in terms of rating, and in my own opinion, and a competition winner, hence my new pro status!) was not featured and has less hits total than any of those which appeared in the newsletter got in one day. As a result, I'm inclined to view ratings as more valuable than views as a quality metric. As such. it might be interesting to see how the ratings break down, like Amazon does: does a rating of 3.5 after 20 rates mean lots of 5s and 1s, or just a whole lot of 3.5s? (I guess that may over-expose the weighting algorithm, though).

More control of axis-scales would be good. (Similar to kelseymh's earlier post.)

Could Instructables traffic be subcategorized as an option?

Linked after viewing another Instructable of author.

Linked thru a contest page.

Linked thru a subcategory (Art, Food, etc.) or group.

Linked via search.

Linked via Featured, Zeitgeist...

Could outside traffic be subcategorized?

I also agree with kelseymh, downloadable .csv files would be very useful for real analysis. Increasing the resolution of traffic sources would allow some testing of writting strategies. Perhaps downloadable reports could contain extra resolution?

I'm not sure if it'll help me write better Instructables (That seems to just take practice. And proofreading.) but it will help me promote them better.

(Speaking of... Would love to see more referrers information on this magic new stats page.)

Something I just noticed: I have some (seemingly random) data points missing on the 3-month chart. In the attached image I'm missing data for Dec 10-12 on the blue line and Dec 3-7 on the green line. But only in the 3-month view. The data is there in the 1-month view.

It looks like it might be some point culling in the charting package, but it feels weird.

1) The "by traffic sources" doesn't seem to work. It just fails back to a default presentation of three of my I'bles, regardless of what I've checked or not.

2) Being able to choose a date range, for example to focus on some viewing spike in the past, would be nice (and ought to be easy :-).

3) Getting a dump of the raw data currently being displayed, e.g., as a CSV file, would let number crunchers like me play our own games. It also means that you wouldn't have to implement all of the proper statistical analysis stuff (mean, variance, etc.).

4) Why did you choose to have a separate dangling "go" hyperlink, rather than simply making each I'bles title a link?

About This Topic

Bio:Eric J. Wilhelm is the founder of Instructables. He has a Ph.D. from MIT in Mechanical Engineering. Eric believes in making technology accessible through understanding, and strives to inspire others ...read more »